Robert kann's first book, The Multinational Empire, published in two large volumes in 1950, has become a classic in its field. As Stanley Winters has well said, “It is rare when a scholar's first book establishes its author in the front rank of his field, and it is rarer still when the book remains a standard work for the balance of his lifetime”. In 1964, a considerably enlarged German edition was published.

Recalling the medieval pageantry of the coronation of the future emperor Joseph II as King of the Romans in Frankfurt in 1764, the sexagenarian Johann Wolfgang von Goethe mentions among the names of the special ambassadors attending the solemn occasion Prince Esterházy, the Bohemian envoy, [who] was not tall, though well built, vivacious, and at the same time of noble respectability, yet neither proud nor cold. I had a special liking for him, because he reminded me of the Marshall de Broglio.

Czech nationalism differs in one important respect from its Polish and Hungarian counterparts: the Czech nation did not have a “national” aristocracy. As a result, so the conventional wisdom goes, when the modern Czech nationalist movement emerged, even its leading elites were only a few generations removed from the countryside, giving it a supposedly more egalitarian and bourgeois coloring. This affected its ideology and political program, and by extension, helped account for the relative stability of the interwar Czechoslovak democracy, the most successful of the “successor states.”

It is not very often that the lands of Central Europe are uppermost in the historical consciousness of Western public opinion. Chamberlainesque ignorance has been the norm. In recent years, however, this situation has been at least partially remedied by two events: the dramatic series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, and—the topic of this essay—the perception of, and fascination with, Central Europe as the place from which our modern world sprang.

For hungarian society, as for most of East-Central Europe, the socalled Jewish question has been, and continues to be, an obsessive, seemingly insoluble dilemma that cries out for definition, discussion, commentary, and analysis. The notion persists, in both professional and general opinion, that if only a true historical understanding of the question were possible, a solution would also be within reach. The assumption is almost axiomatic that the Jewish question, with its attendant passions, prejudices, and contradictions, must be the expression of some prior set of causes that holds the key to its deciphering.

This Essay Attempts to contribute to our understanding of the intellectual and cultural history of Central Europe by making explicit a variety of themes that haunt discourse about Austrian culture and by making some suggestions about periodizing the relationship between Austria and German culture. I originally developed these thoughts on Austria as a region of German culture for a conference in 1983 at the Center for Austrian Studies on regions and regionalism in Austria. Although the political institutions of Central Europe have undergone a revolution since then, the question of Austria's relationship to German culture still holds its importance for the historian-and for contemporary Austrians as well. The German culture I have in mind here is not the kleindeutsch national culture of Bismarck's Reich, but rather the realm that was once constituted by the German-speaking lands of the Holy Roman Empire. This geographical space in Central Europe suggests a more ideal realm of the spirit, for which language is our best point of reference and which corresponds to no merely temporal state.

IN DECEMBER 1883, Habsburg political and military leaders met in crisis session to discuss the situation in Serbia. Serious rioting threatened to. topple the friendly government of Prince Milan Obrenović, which two and a half years earlier had concluded a secret agreement in Vienna that made the country a dependency of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Serbian war ministry had rushed troops from the large Belgrade garrison to the troubled areas and had placed the two battalions that remained in the capital on a war footing in an attempt to ensure continued calm. Alarmed by these drastic measures, an Austro-Hungarian crown council, although not obligated to do so under existing treaties with Belgrade, authorized the commitment of Habsburg military forces should unrest escalate to revolution in Serbia.